


Before and After

by Neverever



Category: Avengers (Comics), Marvel 616
Genre: Early in Canon, First Meetings, M/M, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-23
Updated: 2015-01-23
Packaged: 2018-03-08 19:05:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,380
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3220067
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Neverever/pseuds/Neverever
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tony can see the line in his life between before the cave in Afghanistan and after, then he has an encounter that changes him again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Before and After

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [890 Fifth's](890fifth.tumblr.com) ninth round prompt: X Marks the Spot. Inspired by Man Out of Time and lots of early canon.
> 
> Thanks to my beta.

In his life there’s a before and an after and a thick black line marking the border between.

He can’t go back to the way it was and he’s only barely making his way through the brave new world in front of him. The self-help books talk about mourning the past, letting go, embracing the future …. It’s hard. 

There’s the constant reminders of what he’d been before. The old gossip stories of all the crazy stuff he did, the race cars, the starlets, the pretty boys, the buying sprees, the wild parties, all of it immortalized forever in the never-forgetting internet. There’s the other side of course, the incisive documentaries, news stories, and fawning business articles about the Merchant of Death and his reign over Stark Industries, all the pain, the misery, weapons-dealing, the sheer uncaringness of his actions. All that was immortalized too, burned into what’s left of his heart.

A cave in Afghanistan put an end to all that.

Now Tony’s left with the task of rebuilding himself into whatever he will become, one metal-clad foot in front of the other. He’s an awesomely imaginative man although his vision wasn’t expansive enough to include the possibility of sharing a cutting-edge submarine with a self-proclaimed god, a giant man and a tiny woman with wings.

“Iron Man? Any readings?” Giant-Man asked.

Shaking his head, Tony checked his data again. “Nothing,” he said with a sigh. “How hard can it be to track down a guy with pointy ears and a green, scaly Speedo?”

“Apparently pretty hard,” Wasp joked from her perch on Giant Man’s shoulder.

Sometimes Wasp said things that reminded Tony of a New York socialite – Janet Van Dyne. But the woman he once knew was the polar opposite of Wasp.

Objectively speaking, the Avengers gig shouldn’t be working at all. They’re all new to the superhero thing, and sometimes Tony wonders if they’d had only beginner’s luck so far. The Hulk admittedly wasn’t their finest moment. Maybe practice, time, some good leadership would rub off the raw edges. He had high hopes.

Standing nearby, Thor listened carefully. Tony knows he’s smart, although not in the way he and Giant-Man are smart. He’s not a man to be underestimated, though Tony could not understand the god delusion Thor had going on. Bulky Thor walked gracefully through the crowded submarine cabin and posted himself nearby the small window. 

Giant-Man checked his own data. “We’re far from New York and we haven’t seen anything yet. Do you think we should head back?” He sounded frustrated.

Tony frowned and stared at the monitor. He didn’t want to give up just yet. The Sub-Mariner was too dangerous to leave roaming around creating trouble wherever he went. He wished he’d been able to stick a GPS tracker on the man before he disappeared under the waves. “Let’s give it a half-hour more, then we’ll turn back.”

“Works for me,” Wasp said. She flitted about the cabin, eventually settling down on Thor’s shoulder. “Assuming that your boss doesn’t need you back anytime soon.”

“Mr. Stark is a very understanding man,” Tony said. 

Iron Man was Tony’s chance to make it up to the world; payback for all the destruction he left in his wake. He knew what people said about Tony Stark, and while people might grudgingly respect Stark, there was no love for what he had done or the man he was and thought he was. They loved Iron Man though. He’d lose all that if anyone knew who Iron Man really was. That, and he didn’t want anyone to know about the heart condition. 

Life was good. He was happy for once. He couldn’t see how it could get any better.

He picked up on the boredom of his teammates as the submarine powered through the North Atlantic. He might be pushing them too much, but he knew that they wouldn’t regret the waiting when they found the Sub-Mariner. Hmm, that gave him an idea about upgrading the suit. They might be bored, but he was gathering a lot of data about the submarine and his suit. He’d have a lot of projects when they got back to New York. And they got to put the submarine through its paces, so that was a plus.

“Iron Man? Look yonder at that figure floating in the ice,” Thor exclaimed, pointing to a shadowy figure in the water.

“It looks like a man!” Wasp shouted.

Giant-Man exchanged a skeptical look with Tony. “It’s probably just debris caught in the ice.” 

“I know what a man looks like, Giant-Man,” Wasp replied. “Aren’t we going to do something about it?” 

“If I opened the outside hatch, could you grab it?” Tony asked. 

“But what about the outside pressure?” Giant-Man pointed out.

“Aye, I can,” Thor said firmly. “I have faced worse than this water.”

The operation of opening the outside hatch was trickier than Tony anticipated. But, as usual, his engineering worked as he planned. Thor held onto the hatch as Giant-Man maneuvered the sub closer to the target. Tony waited with bated breath in case Thor slipped when he reached for the floating object. True to his word, Thor was able to reel in the mysterious man.

“He’s got him!” Wasp shouted from her station at the window.

Thor slung the body over his shoulder and got back into the hatch. Tony drained the water out of the hatch so that Thor and his prize could enter the main cabin. Thor waited while Tony rigged up a cot for the man.

Wasp buzzed about. “I wonder who he is?”

“Probably fell off a freighter or an oil tanker,” Tony said. 

“He looks like he’s military in that khaki,” she said. “That’s strange -- it’s an old uniform.”

The man was well built, taller than six feet, and frozen through and through. Thor carefully laid the body down on the cot, but there was something on his back so he couldn’t lay flat. The uniform jacket the man had been wearing was in shreds, revealing another uniform.

Wasp flew in closer. “It has to be -- he has to be Captain America,” she said in wonder.

Giant-Man turned the body over to take off the shield strapped to the man’s back. He held up the round shield with the unmistakable white star in the center. He put it down on the man’s chest. “Sure looks like it.”

Thor looked at them all quizzically. “You know this man?”

“He’s a legendary soldier from World War II,” Tony said. “He’s in all the history books.”

Wasp flitted back and forth studying the man. “He looks very well preserved. And very handsome.”

Tony had noticed that. The history books and documentary films never showed Captain America without the mask, and the movies and biopics clearly did not do the man justice.

“Let’s head back to New York.” It was not the way he hoped that their trip would end. 

And the trip back was quieter, more somber, as the team knew they were bringing a war hero back home for an honorable burial. 

Giant-Man was troubled. About an hour out from New York, he sat down on the floor next to Tony at his computer monitor. He hadn’t shrunk down to normal size yet. Tony couldn’t put a name to the scientist behind the mask since he was more on the engineering and applied-science side of things than the academic research side. “Iron Man, nothing’s adding up here.”

“What?”

“Captain America shouldn’t look like he, um, died an hour ago,” Giant-Man observed.

Tony glanced over at the body on the cot. The man seemed to be merely asleep, not found adrift in ice fields. “No, that doesn’t make sense.”

He could hear Wasp explain to Thor who Captain America was, that there had been two or three after the original one, and how important the original was. Thor clearly was enthralled with the stories. “He is sitting in honor in Valhalla with the great warriors,” he thundered. “I must know of the sagas that your people sing of him.”

“There are movies,” Wasp suggested. “Not sure if those qualify as sagas, actually.”

“I mean, I've read case studies about bodies that have been frozen for years. With pictures,” Giant-Man continued. “Captain America doesn’t look anything like what I saw or read. His skin is pink like there’s blood circulating under the skin.”

“Really?” Tony asked.

He got up to study the body and see from himself what Giant-Man had noticed. The army uniform tatters now covered even less of the studier Captain America uniform and the perfect scale mail over the shoulders. His hair had dried to a light blond. Huh, Tony hadn’t quite imagined Captain America as a blond, thinking back to the famous movie actors who had portrayed him. Giant-Man wasn’t wrong. Tony had seen enough corpses in his life to know that something was strange here. 

Aliens, had to be aliens. Seemed to be the answer to everything these days.

Wasp flew past him. “Did you see that? Did you? He’s breathing!” She fluttered around the man’s head.

“Impossible,” Giant-Man stated. 

Tony was mesmerized by rise and fall of the man’s chest. “No, he’s breathing alright.”

They gathered around the cot, watching Captain America shift and stretch like a man waking from a long sleep. Which he was. Tony held his breath as the man blinked a couple times. 

“Bucky?” he asked, his voice hoarse. “Bucky!” he shouted, sitting bolt upright and grabbing the shield.

Chaos broke out. Captain America took a swing at Thor and swatted at Wasp all the while yelling incoherently about Bucky. “Where are you keeping him?”

“Calm down, Captain,” Tony said. He was not going to be the person to shoot down Captain America. It would be bad for the resume.

Captain America, wild and crazed, attacked Giant-Man, who tried to sit him down in an empty chair. He drew his arm back, about to toss the shield directly at Tony. Thor took advantage of the opening. He grasped the Captain firmly by the shoulder and shoved him into the chair held by Giant-Man. The shield clattered loudly as it landed on the floor. They both restrained the man, who strove to free himself from their grasp.

Tony picked up the shield, marveling at its lightness, and propped it against the wall. “Captain, welcome back,” he said.

The man stared at him, wariness in his blue eyes, tension roiling through his body. “Where is Bucky?” he asked.

“Not here,” Tony answered as truthfully as he could. A quick glance of his teammates confirmed his decision to hold off on explaining where and when they all were. Obviously the Captain had suffered some sort of trauma before falling into the sea. “We picked you up in the ocean and we’re on our way back to New York.”

The man took a deep breath. “Friendlies?”

“Yes, just in spectacular costumes!” Wasp said cheerfully. “I’m Wasp! And that’s Giant-Man on your left, Thor on the right.” She patted him on the shoulder.

Once Thor and Giant-Man released him, the Captain began to relax, confusion and worry filling his face. He was a surprisingly handsome and young man, so unlike the stern figure in the war posters and pictures Tony’s father collected. Tony couldn’t get a good read on him, but could see intelligence and curiosity in those sky blue eyes. He stood up to take a closer look at Tony. “And you?”

“Iron Man.”

“Tell me, Iron Man, what exactly is going here?” Captain America asked, casting a knowledgeable eye over the sophisticated scientific gear in the submarine. “This isn’t a ship.”

Surprised, Tony replied, “It’s a long story.” He glanced over at Wasp, who seemed to have adopted Captain America like she would have a wet, lost puppy.

“We’ll tell you all about when we land in New York. There’s a lot you’ll have to catch up on,” she said. 

“But I was in England yesterday and read the newspapers there.”

“You were unconscious when we found you,” Wasp responded.

“It’s been a while,” Tony added.

He tried to not stare as Captain America ran a hand through his hair, pulled on his gloves and tugged the cowl over his head. The man projected a sheer commanding presence even when standing and flexing the shield on his arm.

“So that’s how it is. Hmm. Guess we have time,” Captain America said.

A shiver ran through Tony as he realized that he was standing in the presence of the living Captain America. And the man already was completely unlike anything he’d ever imagined about his childhood idol. A storybook figure come to life in front of them. A living legend.

“Iron Man, we’re close to Ellis Island,” Giant-Man warned him.

“Right,” Tony said. “Everybody, get ready for docking.”

He looked over at Captain America talking to Wasp, not entirely trusting them yet. The Captain nodded at one of Wasp’s jokes. Unexpectedly he glanced up and aimed those beautiful, sad eyes at Tony. Stomach sinking, Tony had no idea what they were getting into with rescuing a lost war hero.

Today’s one for the books, he thought as he steered the submarine. Taking one day at a time, placing one metal-clad foot in front of the other, fighting the good fight despite temptation. Rescuing frozen super soldiers from ice fields was a nice perk of the new job. 

Something seismic had shifted in his life, though; something he wouldn’t be able to put his finger on for months, even years. The cave he understood -- he went down in an explosion and woke up hitched to a machine that would regulate his life forever. A thick black line neatly demarcated before the cave and after. 

How could he have known that a confused blond man with the bluest eyes, lost in time, would change his life so completely? There were no signs, no augurs, no science that could have laid out that future. 

A decade into their partnership, fighting side by side with Captain America, Tony could finally see that other thick black line he so blithely crossed that day. The line written across his life, marking another before and after in his life. 

Before and after Steve.


End file.
